Menota is a network of leading Nordic archives, libraries and research
departments working with medieval texts and manuscript facsimiles. The aim of
Menota is to preserve and publish medieval texts in digital form and to adapt
and develop encoding standards necessary for this work. The archive will contain
texts in the Nordic languages as well as in Latin. There are now 15 members of
Menota (see bottom of the page) and new members are welcome to join the
network.

Menota can now offer 38 Medieval Nordic texts (more than 1.6 million
words), several of which are fully lemmatised. The majority of the texts
are Old Icelandic or Old Norwegian, but there are also some Old Swedish
texts. Old Danish texts as well as Latin ones (from the Nordic
countries) are most welcome. A catalogue with full search facilities was
opened on 29 June 2007.

The texts have been encoded on one or more levels. The most widely used level is
the diplomatic level (as seen in many Arnamagnæan editions), while some texts
have also been encoded on a facsimile level (i.e. in a very close transcription)
and some on a normalised level (as in the Íslenzk fornrit series). These levels
are specified under Facs, Dipl and Norm
in the catalogue. By clicking the file name in the second column of the
catalogue, you will be able to read the text on one or more levels, depending on
how many levels have been encoded.

See our Helpdesk
for an overview of the catalogue and the display of texts in the archive. It also
informs about morphological and syntactic queries that can be made in some of the texts (via PROIEL or
INESS).

Menota now publishes translations of Medieval Nordic texts. At first, two
texts are offered, Jóns saga helga and
Niðrstigningar saga, but we soon hope to welcome more
translations in the archive. The translations will be published in
open CC
licenses. For the time being, they will be published in
PDF.

An editorial board appointed by the Menota council has published a
handbook for the encoding of texts in the archive, The Menota
handbook. Version 1.0 of this handbook was published on 20
May 2003 and it is compatible with TEI P4.

Version 2.0 of the handbook was published on 16
May 2008 and is compatible with TEI P5 (release 1
November 2007). This is a major revision and we recommend that users migrate to
this version. However, all versions will be kept accessible on this site:

Menotec was an infrastructure project funded by the Norwegian Research
Council (2010–2012) with the aim of transcribing and annotating a corpus
of Old Norwegian texts. The transcribed texts have been (and will be)
published in the Medieval Nordic Text Archive, while the annotated texts
have been added to the treebank of the PROIEL project, as well as being
made accessible through the INESS portal. More.

Several dictionaries of Medieval Nordic languages are accessible on the web. They
are presently in different formats and the interfaces are not uniform, but they
do represent an extremely useful resource:

A project headed by Hans Fix, University of Greifswald, has made Walter Baetkes
Wörterbuch zur altnordischen Prosaliteratur accessible in an
updated version for free usage. The dictionary can be downloaded as a PDF file
(75 MB). A fast connection is thus essential.

The council is an advisory body in which each participating institution is
represented by one member. Different departments or sections at the same
university are recognised as individual institutions. In addition to the
permanent members, other representatives may join the meeting at the discretion
of the board.

As stated in the left column, version 2.0 is the
latest version of the Menota handbook. Version 3.0 is now in preparation with
Odd Einar Haugen as general editor. Ths version will also contain contributions
from Haraldur Bernharðsson, Marco Bianchi, Karl G. Johansson, Alex Speed
Kjeldsen, Robert K. Paulsen, Friederike Richter, Beeke Stegmann and Tarrin
Wills. This version is scheduled for publication in 2017 or early 2018.

There are minutes from several of the meetings by the contributors to the
handbook.

Menota now welcomes texts from other institutions or individual researchers, but
cannot presently offer assistance in converting texts to XML. Please contact one
of the board members (see above) if you would like to deposit a text in the
archive. We encourage potential depositors to read the encoding guidelines in
the Menota handbook and validate the text against the Menota DTD contained in
the handbook. Sample XML files are available for inspection and comparison. The
Menota depositor license, which is based on a corresponding document used by the
Oxford Text Archive, has parallel Norwegian and English text. Please note that
the depositor keeps all his or her intellectual rights to the text after
depositing it in the archive. The same text may be withdrawn at any time and
also published in other archives and other formats at the depositors will (cf.
section 3.4 in the license):